There are obvious difficulties to port Fremantle to the Neo900. First of all is lack of manpower.

Currently, the only development on Maemo OS is being done inside CSSU with a very small team of developers, and it's difficult to think that they will be able to maintain both CSSU for N900 and a new port for the Neo900 at the same time.

Even now, CSSU has clear problems due to lack of developers. There is a big gap between CSSU Stable and Testing, kernel is not yet part of CSSU, Thumb is maintained separately...

But also there will be a clash of interests regarding development for N900 and Neo900. For example, open source replacements for closed applications are not entering CSSU, even when they are ready for prime time, and we see that improved/upstream versions of packages are not allowed to be part of it.

That could be fine from a POV of full stability over any other consideration, but a port to a different hardware will require to rewrite as many closed source components as possible.

Because it's not just enough to run an unmodified Fremantle image on the Neo900 with a shiny new kernel. Using closed source applications from Nokia in a non Nokia device, would be illegal, and even if Nokia might not care about it now, it's a clear risk to the project as a C&D could be received at any moment.

I can only suggest that CSSU and Neo900 porting should become a single project, an upstream Maemo/Fremantle OS that could be installed in both devices and maintained at the same time with a minimum set of different packages for the most specific hardware bits. Such a project should try to replace as much closed source components as possible, one by one (unlike Mer tried building a new OS from scratch), without loosing compatibility with most existing software (maybe not 100% of compatibility is possible though).

One possible approach to the porting task, would be to start running Maemo ("Freemantle" anyone?) in other devices, instead of waiting to the Neo900 to be ready. The OpenPandora, for example, would be a perfect sandbox to try out how portable is the system. The classic versions shares most of the hardware with the N900 and it doesn't have the most difficult bits (GPS and GSM), while the new 1GHz version, is very similar to what the Neo900 will offer.

Porting "Freemantle" to the OpenPandora hardware, could also attract some of the very talented developers that they already have.